Egyptians are sweeping up in Tahrir Square after celebrations marking the first anniversary of the Jan. 25 launch of their revolution. In a few days, on Feb. 11, they will mark another milestone, one year since hundreds of thousands of protestors toppled President Hosni Mubarak, who had held power for almost 30 years.
One year ago, amid the euphoric suggestions that democracy and freedom lay just around the corner, the journalist Christopher Hitchens sounded a note of caution. Hitchens, who died last December, had witnessed revolutions succeed in a host of countries. He had identified the ingredients he found necessary for freedom to replace tyranny. He didn’t think those essential ingredients existed in Egypt.
As he often did, he went against the conventional wisdom and warned that while the “seeds have surely been sown,” Egyptian democracy was not about to be born. He declared success remained far off, pessimistically concluding, “this wouldn’t be the first revolution in history to be partially aborted.”
Writing in the first week of February, before Mubarak fell, he all but predicted in his Vanity Fair column that the revolution would fizzle out.
Whether his prediction failed or not, Hitchens’ opinion was instructive because of his special insights. He had covered the struggle against tyranny in starkly different contexts, reporting from the ground about the fall of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the demise of dictatorships in places like South Korea, Chile and Portugal, among others.
He dismissed the analysis that looked at the then optimistically-labeled Arab Spring and saw an enchanting new version of what sprouted in 1989 in places like Poland and Czechoslovakia. In Eastern Europe, the people basically wanted to join Western Europe, he said. In essence, all they had to do was knock down the wall to make it happen. The European Union and NATO were there, he said, ready to hand them material help, a political system and well-formed political organizations consistent with democracy.
A common denominator in all the successful revolutions — the ones that ended with new systems embracing equality, freedom and democracy — was that they were driven by well-developed ideologies and charismatic individuals committed to the modern ideals of liberty.
South Africa had Nelson Mandela when the white-rule regime ended. The Philippines had Benigno Aquino to lead after Ferdinand Marcos; South Korea had Kim Dae Jung; the Czechs had Vaclac Havel and the Poles had Lech Walesa.
Even revolutions that succeeded in overthrowing a regime but failed to bring freedom had strong, charismatic leaders. Egypt’s revolution, Hitchens noted, had no discernible leader. It didn’t even have the kind of personalities who could lead a counter-revolution, Egyptian versions of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini or Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe.
In addition to lacking an opposition leader, he pointed out, Egyptians launched their revolution amid desperate economic conditions that would force them to remain reliant on Western cash, whether from tourism or from military aid.
Hitchens dismissively observed that Egypt had no organized political parties, “with the partial exception of the obsessively-cited Muslim Brotherhood.”
Was he wrong?
Some analysts have declared that there has been no “regime change” in Egypt, because the army remains in power, just as it was while Mubarak was president. And, to be sure, a military junta still rules and is trying to preserve as much power as possible. But there is no denying that Egypt, and the rest of the Arab world, are undergoing dramatic political change.
Hitchens was wrong in thinking Egypt’s revolution would not overturn the system. But he was right in foreseeing the uprising’s inability, at least in the near term, to bring the kind of system that liberals in Egypt were demanding.
The Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist parties swept parliamentary elections and will now write the country’s constitution and dominate the political environment.
And yet, the shortcomings of the revolution Hitchens noted — a lack of individual leadership, the absence of a convincing political ideology and the existence of harsh financial constraints — mean that the ultimate outcome of the revolution, in the longer term, could still be up for grabs.
Hitchens was right that the euphoria of the liberals, and their supporters in the West, was misplaced. This was no freedom Spring sprouting in Cairo. For now, the Islamists have won and the liberals have lost. But the missing ingredients of the revolution, insightfully enumerated by Hitchens a year ago, leave a small opening for the forces of liberal democracy to fight another day.
By Frida Ghitis, a world affairs columnist, author and consultant.